PROVIDENCE, R.I.

— The David Winton Bell Gallery will present two decades of work by
noted political artist Sue Coe in a new exhibition, Commitment to the Struggle: The Art of Sue
Coe, Sept. 7 through Oct. 27, 2002, in the List Art Center. The artist will discuss her work
during a public opening reception on Friday, Sept. 13 at 5:30 p.m.

Born in Britain, Coe moved to the United

States in 1972 and began work as an
illustrator for the op-ed page of The New
York Times. Her drawings have since been
published in The New Yorker, Time,
Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones,
National Lampoon and Artforum, among
others. Commitment to the Struggle will
include drawings and prints depicting such
varied topics as the Ku Klux Klan,
apartheid, Malcolm X and skinheads;
AIDS; labor and sweatshop conditions; war
and the economic interests of the
petrochemical industry; and vivisection, animal rights and the American meat industry.

[Above right: Arms Merchants, from War 1, 1999. Sketchbook. Copyright ©1999 Sue Coe.
Courtesy Galerie St. Etienne, New York.]

Editors: Digital images are available through the News Service at (401) 863-2476.

“Coe has an unerring instinct for anticipating significant issues,” says Jo-Ann Conklin,
director of the Bell Gallery. “Her book, How to Commit Suicide in South Africa, (1983) –
about the death of Stephen Biko and other student organizers in South African prisons –
became an anti-apartheid organizing tool used on college campuses to persuade investors to
divest themselves of South African stock. Similarly, her 1986 book, X (The Life and Times of
Malcolm X), prefigured the resurgence of popular interest in the black leader.”

Politics were an integral part of everyday life for Coe as she was growing up in the United
Kingdom. “I became an illustrator in the first instance to earn a living ... then I saw the
possibility of injecting content into the medium,” she says.

Since 1986 Coe has increasingly devoted her energies to the protection of animals in industry,
from factory farming to medical research and genetic engineering. Her dedication to animal
rights began early; she grew up in a house adjacent to a slaughterhouse, with all its associated
sights and smells. From 1986 to 1992 she visited slaughterhouses in the United States, Canada
and England, gaining access to stockyard operations through associates who worked in the
meat industry. Although the owners didn’t allow cameras or videos, they apparently
considered Coe’s sketchbook harmless. Her research resulted in a series she calls Porkopolis –
the slang term for Cincinnati, the first centralized meat processing center in the United States.
Published in 1996 under the title Dead Meat, the series provides a dark, detailed look at the
American meat industry.
“Many of the images are gruesome and
difficult to look at, depicting as they do
practices employed in factory farms and
slaughterhouses, practices that in many
cases are unthinkable and well hidden in
modern society,” notes Conklin. “Other
images – such as Modern Man Followed
by the Ghosts of his Meat and Scientists
Find a Cure for Empathy – use satire,
sarcasm or humor to inform.”

[Above right: Modern Man Followed by

the Ghosts of His Meat. 1990. Photo-
etching on white heavyweight Rives paper.
Copyright ©1990 Sue Coe. Courtesy Galerie St. Etienne, New York.]

Coe links the victimization of animals in Porkopolis to situations of social and political
oppression. The meat industry exploits its workers and pollutes the environment, according to
the artist; she contends its abuse of animals is a variation on the theme of the exploitation of
the weak by the strong.

“Human rights and animal rights or liberation are interconnected,” she says. “When we in the
West changed from being serfs to industrial workers, we lost any connection with the land and
nature. ... We live lives that are increasingly alienated from any reality, which makes it easier
for the meat industry – or any other industry that puts profit before life – to pull the wool over
our eyes. The reality is, if we continue to poison, pollute and multiply, we will cease to exist
as a species. ... My aim is to use my work to end factory farming in this country in the next
decade.”

The Coe exhibition was organized by the David Winton Bell Gallery with assistance from
Galerie St. Etienne, New York. The Bell Gallery is open Monday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 4
p.m., and Saturday and Sunday, 1 to 4 p.m. All events are free and open to the public. For
more information, call (401) 863-2932.

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Sue Coe is one of the most important politically oriented artists living in the U.S.
today. From the outset of her career working as an illustrator for such publications as
the New York Times and Time Magazine, Coe was committed to reaching a broad
audience through the print media. Later, she began creating extended visual
discourses on subjects (such as racial discrimination or animal rights) that she felt
were not being adequately addressed by conventional news organizations. Widely
written about and exhibited, Coe has appeared on the cover of Art News and been
the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture
Garden in Washington, D.C. Her work is in the collections of many major museums,
including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New
York.

Sue Coe has been exclusively represented by the Galerie St. Etienne since 1989. As
the artist's representative, the gallery performs a number of services on her behalf.